Need exp scaling for a role playing game

Cafe Society
1

I’m making up my own role-playing game. It has a hodgepodge of elements from many other RPG’s Ive seen or played. But one thing I’m kind of stuck on is setting the exp scaling.

If the amount of xp doubles each time a character goes up a level, the character will be mired in ‘mid level doldrums’ for quite a long time, unless the GM offered monsters with obscene amounts of xp. I was trying to come up with some system that would be balanced (not impossible to max out character, but not too easy to max out a character either) with the potential for exp bonuses/penalties depending on circumstances and character abilities. Any ideas?

2

I was always fond of Shadowrun’s levelling system. There are no ‘levels,’ per se, but you get karma for completing tasks, adventures, whatever. Then you could use that karma to buy new skills, knowledge, or stats.

You might consider asking around and seeing if any friends have the book.

3

Experience points are a completely arbitrary scale. Take any level progression scheme, and the GM’s judgment will determine how fast characters advance.

That said, AD&D 3.5e has a formula I kinda like, where to get to level n + 1, you need 1000n xp. But there’s also something to be said for non-level based systems. Is that something you’re willing to explore?

4

I prefer level-based systems because they let me get a beter grasp on how powerful a character is. Give me a 5th level fighter and I know what I’m dealing with, within a broad range of skills, abilities and so forth. Give me a mess of unconnected stats, and I have to start adding up numbers just to compare him to anyone else. Sometimes, a framework is useful.

Besides, esperience level is a good way to measure “general badassness”, which is a quality completely independant of any ability score or skill. The guy who wins in a swordfight is not always the guy who’s trained the most with the sword, nor is he the the fastest or strongest one around; he’s often just the best fighter.

5

I’ve considered non-level based systems; I saw it in games like Vampire:The Masquerade, where you used ‘skill points’ to ‘buy’ betters stats/skills. I like this because it allows a player character to really customize things- while the character’s class might be subject to certain limitations, they still have plenty of potential to hash out a very unique character. However, the advantage I see to having characters ‘level’ is though object-oriented design. If PCs/NPCs have levels, you can use their level to determine various things. Its also easier for certain class milestones; gaining new abilities at higher levels, for example. I’m considering both, as the game I’m making up could work with either, but I’ll have to settle on one or the other early on in designing the game. (this will be just a simple pencil-and-paper RPG, by the way).

In all likelihood, I’ll probably settle for a comprimise, by having both ‘experience’ points and ‘skill’ points, with actions/enemies offering either or both.

6

You could look at it another way. Say that a character has to earn 1000 xp to “buy” a level. Whether he’s 20th level or 1st level it’s still only 1000 xp to go up a level. However, he earns experience by overcoming challenges appropriate to his level. So killing a kobold would earn a 2nd level character 5 xp. A 30th level character would earn nothing for that because it wouldn’t be a challenge.

This way there would be no mid-level doldrums because the progression rate is mostly up to the GM’s judgement of how much the character is learning on his or her adventures. Of course, now you have problems with players freaking out when you’re only handing out 100 xp adventure awards when you were giving them 150 xp for the exact same challenge level last week…

7

But that’s how it is for any system. As I said before, XP is an arbitrary scale because how it’s given out is completely at the discretion of the GM.

8

Join the club. :slight_smile: I’m also creating my own RPG, although mine doesn’t have character levels (Or most of the other things you’d typically expect a rules heavy RPG to have. Stats, hit points, etc…)

One possibility you might want to consider is to have the experience cost of gaining a level, the amount of experience you gain from an encounter, and the increase in power given by a level all fixed and independent of your current level. Since the increase in power is only interesting relative to your current level, the same increase is much less important at level 20 than it is at level 1.

You might also want to consider making the level gap relatively small, preventing the aforementioned mid-level doldrums problem. Of course, I would suggest a level requiring 1 EXP, preferring a level free system as I do. :slight_smile: But if you want decreased granularity in characters (which is a good chunk of the point of having levels), some degree of smoothing like a flat rate of 2000 EXP per level would also work.

9

First, as for the mid-level doldrums, the GM has to learn to challenge the characters, and I’ve discovered that it’s not always easy for DMs to do this, especially at mid levels. (Also, you don’t have to use the Gygax-inspired geometric progression. Rolemaster used a linear progression: 10,000 XP for 1st-10th levels, 20,000 xp for 11th-20th levels, etc… (I could have the exact numbers wrong, it’s been years.))

Secondly, I think a lot of xp systems get bogged down in the false precision of requiring thousands of XP to go up a level. When was the last time you earned 1XP, or cared about earning 1 XP? Even at 1st level in old-school AD&D, that was four hundredths of a percent of the experience award needed to advance to second level thief.

And the problem develops a life of its own as the paperwork required to keep track of all that false precision becomes part of play. My current gaming group has a “Experience Guideline” sheet that one DM made popular, and now no matter who DMs, we are expected to abide by it. It has entries like “Single Kill - XP value of creature” under Fighter and “Spell Cast In Combat - Spell Level times Caster Level times 100.” And players keep long lists of every creature killed and every spell cast, and hand them to the DM at the end of each session so that the DM doesn’t forget to give them their 35 points for a kobold or their 100 points for a cantrip.

It always kind of irritated me. I would boycott note-taking for experience purposes and just give the DM a note at experience-calculating-time saying “I spent my time roleplaying, not min-maxing my notes. You know what I contributed.”

One thing that I wanted to do but was never popular was to use a Character Point system for AD&D 2E with Skills and Powers. Instead of awarding experience, I would just go ahead and award character points according to how you performed with respect to your level of ability. These could be used to buy skills and there would be a simple table for level progression: every 4 character points you earn bumps you up a level.

If you’re first level, cleaning out a Kobold lair may earn you 1 or 2 character points. But doing the same at 10th level wouldn’t earn you squat… there’s a rogue mage/thief leading a band of highwaymen and making local commerce impossible. Neutralize them and you’ll get a couple CPs.

See, that way you adjust the conditions for award instead of the thresholds for gaining a level, and by only counting in single digits, you eliminate all the XP accounting. (Not to mention the possibility of cheating… I encountered one player that would regularly pad his xp awards… forcing the DM to keep track of everyone’s XP total as well… what a pain.)

10

There’s also the Challenge Rating of the encounter, which determines how powerful the enemy is relative to the PC party. If the enemy is more powerful the PCs will get more experience, but there is a greater chance they will get killed too. I don’t know if they changed it for 3.5, but the 3.0 Dungeon Master’s Guide has tables to determine the actual XP values. Basically a party of 4 PCs of the same level will advance to the next level after around 14 evenly matched encounters. A difference of 8 or more means it’s a hugely mismatched encounter, so the table doesn’t give a default XP award and the DM has to adjudicate something based on the circumstances.

Incubus, you may want to consider a hybrid level/skill system like the ones used in Fallout and Arcanum. When you overcome challenges you get experience, which you use to gain a new level. Then you get skill points to improve your character in whatever way you want. That way you can tell at a glance approximately how powerful a character is, and still have the wide open flexibility of the skills.

11

I think you need to ask an expert here.

12

I think you need to ask an expert here.

13

You could just give them exp awards that you want, or just award them levels now and then.

14

No. Whatever you do, don’t do it this way.

I played a campaign where this was done once - we all hated it. It lends the distinct impression that the GM is not only making things up as he goes along, but arbitrarily railroading the PCs as he does it.

We could see no rhyme or reason as to why we’d ern a level in one session, then the next session accomplish more than we had in the previous three sessions, and yet not earn a level.

15

I always liked the champions way of giving out experience:

Have a gaming session: 1 xp
Defeat a really tough enemy or puzzle or mystery during that session: 1 xp
Roleplay your character really well: 1 xp
Conclude a multi-session story arc: 1 xp
Achieve one of your character’s core goals: 1 xp
Screw up royally, play out of character, rules-lawyering, being a jerk: -1 xp

And so forth.

I like the 1 adventure = 1 xp granularity. Since Champions had a point based character building system, that 1 xp bought you 1 point of new powers/characteristics/skills, you could save them up or cash them in whenever you liked. And it didn’t need scaling because a 1 pt increase is a big improvement on a 100 point character but not much on a 250 point character.

This might not work so well with a level-based system (I don’t like level based systems), but all you have to do is scale it properly. You can keep the progression linear, since each gaining xp depends on the characters facing challanges appropriate to their skill level. Say you are going to be gaming religiously every Friday night for a year long campaign. That’s 50 sessions. If you start out at first level, where do you want your players to be at after a year of play? Still apprentices? Journeymen? Masters? Demigods? If you want them to be somewhere around 10th level after a solid year of playing, and they are earning 1-4 xp per session, with an average of, say, 2.5 xp per session, that’s 150 experience points per year, so you’d need 15 points per level, and they are going up a level every month or two.

The advantage of this system is that the characters get worthwhile experience every session, there’s no accounting nightmare, and characters progress at a fairly steady rate as long as they are facing and accepting challenges appropriate to them rather than hunting squirrels for xp. If the players are going up too fast, just start being more stingy with the bonus “roleplaying” or “tough challange” awards and just give them their base 1 xp per session unless they do something really special.